Note: Beware of a website proclaiming to be New Tribal Ventures/An Ishmael Community! Do not reply to any request for information. Our legitimate pages are available on our site here & on the navigation to the left.

From The Story of B:Excerpt 2

“The Gebusi are one of those agricultural peoples whose agricultural style owes nothing at all to our revolution. In fact, it would make better sense to call them hunter-gardeners than farmers. . .

The main difference between them and us is their theory of sickness and death. In the Gebusi theory, there’s no such thing as death from ‘natural causes.’ All causes of sickness and death are supernatural, and every sickness and death is caused by someone who literally ‘wishes you ill.’ This may be a sorcerer or it may be the spirit of someone living or dead or even the spirit of an animal. To achieve a diagnosis in the case of illness, a medium visits the spirit world in order to discover the guilty party, and this information indicates the best means of treatment.

“If someone dies, the medium conducts an inquest in consultation with the spirits. Not every inquest leads to the accusation of a living person, but when it does, the accused sorcerer is given the chance to demonstrate his or her innocence by performing a sago divination, a cooking feat so difficult that skill alone can’t assure success. Complete success is taken as a sign that the spirit of the deceased was on hand to help out and thus exonerate the accused. Partial success leaves the matter in doubt, and the accused will be spared for a while as other indicators are considered, such as the behavior of the corpse in the suspect’s presence . . .

Chances are, the miscreant’s days are numbered. Most commonly, a family member of the deceased does away with him or her.

“Among the Gebusi, the spirits of the dead soon return as animals. . . Executed sorcerers invariably return as wild pigs, which is why (I suspect) executed sorcerers are invariably cooked and eaten. My guess is that, being sorcerers, they are already in some sense wild pigs, which are hunted not only because they’re good to eat but because they’re inhabited by malevolent spirits.”

“Now to the point of this anthropological exercise. I want you to imagine that it was not the people of our culture who teemed over the world and made it their own but rather the Gebusi. I want you to imagine a world where every death is routinely avenged by killing and eating a sorcerer. I want you to imagine a world where, if you were a telephone installer, legislator, symphony conductor, or fashion designer in Berlin or Beijing or Tokyo or London or New York City—or Box Elder, Montana—you might at any moment be required to perform a successful sago divination in order to save your life. I want you to imagine a world where eating sorcerers is a perfectly normal thing to do—as normal as sending your children off to educational concentration camps when they reach the age of five or six. I want you to imagine a world where killing a man will turn him into a wild pig as surely as putting a man in prison for a few years will turn him into a good citizen.”

B paused at this point and gave Jared a hopeful look that he wasn’t sure how to answer. But he said, “I think you’re telling me that every culture’s lunacy seems like sanity to the members of that culture.”

“That’s certainly so,” B said. “If I were to tell you that the Gebusi believe that the creator of the universe has spoken to only one people on this earth during its entire history, and that one people is the Gebusi, you would smile patronizeingly. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose I would.”

“Yet this is precisely what the people of our culture believe, isn’t it? Has the creator of the universe spoken to anyone but us?”